Schreiner football chases wins, not just survival, in first ASC season
Allen has framed the program’s arrival as an active commitment to Kerrville, not just a marketing message. While incoming freshmen attend orientation this week, Allen is sending the team’s 40 returners into the community for flood relief work and a cleanup project at Ty Cemetery.
When Keith Allen was hired in February 2025 to rebuild football at Schreiner University — a program that hadn’t fielded a team since 1957 — the expectations from campus were modest.
“When I got brought in, they were like, ‘We just hope you don’t embarrass yourself,'” Allen recalled. “I was like, ‘Well, you hired the wrong guy. I’m going to try to win every game.'”
Allen’s path to the job was unconventional. He wasn’t among the finalists Schreiner initially offered the position to during its coaching search. He was brought in on an emergency basis after Kenneth Treschitta, the coach Schreiner had introduced as its head coach in July 2024, resigned for health reasons before ever coaching a game.
On Saturday, the Mountaineers wrapped up their third day of fall camp at the Edington Sports Complex, the first day of practice in shells. Schreiner is coming off a 5-1 developmental “year zero” season in 2025 and is preparing to jump straight into varsity competition in the American Southwest Conference, a league Allen and his staff describe as one of the top NCAA Division III conferences in the country, home to programs such as Mary Hardin-Baylor and Hardin-Simmons.
Allen said the difference between this year’s team and the one that took the field a year ago is “night and day.”
A staff built for Texas
To compete in Texas college football, Allen built a staff he says carries instant credibility with high school coaches across the state. Offensive coordinator David Jones and defensive coordinator Shane Hallmark are both former Texas high school head coaches.
“I hired a fantastic staff and these guys have taken the bull by the horns,” Allen said. “Sitting at this table, you got to understand we have over 500 career coached games and over 300 victories as head coaches. There’s not another team in the ASC that has that many head coaching games under their belt.”
Jones said the move from Tivy to college has let him build the roster around his own system.
“High school, you have what you have and you adapt and you adjust,” Jones said. “The fun part of being here in college, you recruit to match your system. You recruit guys that you want to coach, guys that you feel like will fit into the university and buy into what you’re really trying to build and develop.”
Jones described an offense built on tempo. “We’re running. We’re running and we’re keeping up,” he said. “It’s one gear, one speed, and it’s full speed ahead.”
Hallmark said his defense is bigger and more aggressive than the unit that played in 2025. “We’re a lot bigger, more physical, faster — we’re able to recruit the guys we want that fit our system,” he said. “I expect them to get better every day, and I think we’re going to have a formidable defense before it’s all said and done.”
Recruiting close to home
Allen’s recruiting strategy is built entirely inside state lines.
“It’s 100% Texas,” Allen said. “We have all Texans. There’s no need to leave the state. There’s no need to go out of the state.”
The staff targets San Antonio, Houston, Austin, Dallas, Corpus Christi, West Texas and the Hill Country, and ran satellite camps this summer in Dallas, Houston, Corpus Christi, Midland and Kerrville that drew nearly 600 prospects. Allen said the approach is relational rather than transactional — phone calls, text messages and handwritten postcards, a skill he had to teach some of his younger assistants.
Allen said shifts in Division I recruiting, where coaches increasingly favor experienced transfer-portal players over incoming high school signees, have pushed talented players further down the college ranks.
“What happens is now the Division IIs are waiting to see what drops through,” Allen said. “It’s pushing great athletes down levels of football. Ten, 15 years ago, the kids we got on our campus today, I wouldn’t have been able to touch at a Division II school with the scholarships that I had.”
Schreiner signed 107 players for its 2025 developmental season and added 111 more for the 2026 varsity debut, 104 of them straight out of Texas high schools. The program retained roughly 40 players from last year’s team, in line with the 50% retention rate typical of a startup program.
A culture built by players
Allen said those 40 returners have become the backbone of the program’s identity.
“Those guys have done everything we’ve asked them to do,” Allen said. “They’ve worked their tails off. They’ve bought in. The type of kid we’re getting at this program is the kid that wants to build something, a legacy, and be able to say, ‘I built that.'”
Allen said a program’s culture can’t be handed down by coaches — it has to come from the players themselves.
“If it’s coach speak, it’s a rule, right? It’s martial law,” Allen said. “But if it comes from player to player, that’s a culture.”
He pointed to a small but telling change: Last year it took 15 minutes of instruction to get players lined up for post-practice stretching. This year, they lined up immediately.
“We had so much leadership from the kids from last year’s team showing the young kids the ropes,” Allen said. “This time last year, I had eight coaches on our staff that had never worked together, and 107 players that never played college football. Fast forward 365 days, it’s night and day where we’re at right now.”
With more than 145 players now on the roster, Jones said no position is settled heading into the season.
“We don’t have a starter at any position right now,” Jones said. “It’s a wide-open group of 11. We’ll find the best 11. We’ll put them out there. But it’s a lot of fun watching kids compete, knowing there are some guys right next to them that can play the game, and it’s going to make us better.”
Investing in the community
Allen has framed the program’s arrival as an active commitment to Kerrville, not just a marketing message. While incoming freshmen attend orientation this week, Allen is sending the team’s 40 returners into the community for flood relief work and a cleanup project at Ty Cemetery.
The program’s “Little Monty” initiative, run in partnership with Kerrville ISD, has put maroon Schreiner football T-shirts on thousands of local elementary students.
“From our end, we’re doing everything we can to let the community know who we are,” Allen said. “I just want to make sure, one, our kids are invested in this community, and two, our community sees our kids being invested — and maybe they want to come to a game.”
Sizing up the ASC
Allen knows the jump to the American Southwest Conference means facing programs that operate with what he calls Division I-level atmospheres. To prepare university leadership for that reality, he took Schreiner President Dr. Charlie McCormick, Vice President Lucien Costley and the rest of the university’s cabinet on a road trip last season, during Schreiner’s bye week, to watch Mary Hardin-Baylor play Hardin-Simmons. McCormick drove the van.
“I wanted them to see what we signed up for, because I knew, but I don’t think they knew,” Allen said. “There were some eyes that got opened big when we did that.”
The 2026 schedule includes road trips to Oklahoma Panhandle State, Southwestern and Centenary. Allen said he won’t let his roster — which he says is two years younger, on average, than most of the teams it will face — use that as an excuse.
“We can either use that as an excuse and kowtow down, or we can say it doesn’t matter, because our 11 against their 11, they still got to make plays,” Allen said. “Our kids have really rung the bell and bought into that.”
Allen, who has coached as a special teams coordinator at Ohio State, a Division II head coach and a Florida high school coach, said building a program from nothing weighs on him daily.
“What keeps me up at night? What gets me excited in the morning? Oh, everything. Both,” Allen said. “I’ve got eight coaches that said, ‘I want to join you,’ and they moved their families to Kerrville, Texas. I have players who chose to be with me. I have a community of 23,000 people, and a university of 1,500 people that are looking to see what we do, and I don’t take that lightly.”
Schreiner opens its varsity era at 6 p.m. Sept. 5 against Austin College under the lights at Antler Stadium.
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